In the past, certain local telephone service providers have offered a differentiated ringing service for households wanting to have two numbers on the same line. With this service, two different telephone numbers were associated to a same telephone line and all the phones at the customer premises rang either one of two ways, depending on the phone number called. Thus, when a caller dialed the first number, all the phones in the household ring one way and when the caller dialed the second number, all the phones rang a second, slightly different way.
While this service allowed users in a household to identify without picking up the intended recipient of incoming phone calls, it does not allow a user to avoid getting disturbed by telephone calls not intended for them. However, it is well known that different users in a household, workplace, or other premises may have vastly varying phone usage habits/requirements. Yet it can be very frustrating to a user to be constantly disturbed by phone calls intended for another user, particularly when he/she cannot allow himself to unplug the telephone for fear of missing an important call.
Today, POTS home telephony is being replaced by VoIP alternatives. VoIP systems provide users with home telephone systems analogous to POTS telephony but using packet-based networks such as the Internet instead of analog POTS networks for communicating. Advantageously, VoIP offers a number of options not available, or costly, on POTS systems and VoIP allows for data communication to supplement voice communication. As a result, VoIP systems tend to be more flexible and can do more than POTS-type telephony systems.
There is a need in the industry for a telephony system that mitigates at least one disadvantage of the prior art.